Day 61 – An electric blue escort and a flyby from a friend

Yesterday was a rather frustrating day as we had about 24 hours of painfully slow progress with mixed up winds and sea state following tropical storm Ela. We spent far more time than we would have wanted travelling at 0.1kts and in one four hour period we covered only a single nautical mile. It means that currently we are about 36 hours behind where we had expected. With favorable winds forecast for the next week we should be able to make up some ground but it is looking likely that our arrival into the Hawaii Yacht Club will be delayed by a day. All character building stuff as we’d been having it quite easy surfing along for a few days previously.

However in the evening things started looking up on board Doris. Firstly our speed picked up enough for us to switch the autopilot back on. Then Nat and I on our first dark shift were joined by a huge shoal of the electric blue mahi mahi fish. They were swimming along the boat on both sides, their bodies shimmering silver in the beam from our nav light. They are really inquisitive and were getting really close to our oars as we were rowing. So close in fact that both Nat and I managed to clip one as we were paddling. The fish stayed with us all night over a period of 8 hours and there must have been hundreds of them passing us in total. It was a pretty awesome experience and we spent a lot of time chatting to them as we rowed along.

Then this morning we had another visit from our friends the cargo ship Mokihana. They had emailed us to let us know that they should be passing us around 6pm UTC and so we had been excited about seeing them all night. They were a little bit later than expected and so Nat and I were out on the oars when they made contact on the VHF radio again. Laura had a good chat with them as they approached. Apparently among their current cargo is a couple of hundred head of cattle and a circus petting zoo. The petting zoo includes a donkey called Mokihana who was born on board the ship last year! Since it was daylight this time we could see them approaching and they are HUGE! A call came through on the radio from captain Tom ‘we’re going shaving, don’t worry we won’t nick you.’ They came for a proper flyby this time passing around 450m in front of us altering their course so they could get a good view. They were close enough that we could see them out on deck waving at us as we had a great time waving and whistling back. They are going to send us some photos so we can see what Doris looks like from that perspective. It properly made our day again and we are really grateful for them taking the time out to come and see us again.

Another memorable day on planet Earth. The New Horizons Spacecraft passed our furthest (Dwarf) Planet, Pluto by only 12,500 Km after 9.5 years cruising at around 35,000 mph.. Awesome, The Mokihana passed our most remote rowing boat (Doris) by only 450m. Not long now girls, Honolulu is just a few waves away. Well done, life is good. Stay safe. XX